


Covenants

by zinke



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, Josh/Donna UST, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-04
Updated: 2006-11-04
Packaged: 2018-09-17 06:41:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9309887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zinke/pseuds/zinke
Summary: Promises borne from love are a mighty and humbling thing. Post-episode for ‘Isaac and Ishmael’.





	

**Author's Note:**

> It’s difficult not to feel the effects of the anniversary of 9/11 when you are living in New York City. I imagine it’s hard not to feel it if you don’t live in The City, either. Anyway, this was largely composed on the fifth anniversary, and is dedicated to everyone who lost someone, or something, on that clear September morning. 
> 
> In my world, this episode takes place in the happy land of season two, after The Stackhouse Filibuster and before Seventeen People. And for those who read this and cry ‘injustice’ to my changing a bit of first season canon, I apologize. That said there is no way that Josh could have given back that NSC card. That’s just not how these things work. So, in my world, it was handed right back to him. Sorry.

A stack of dusty files cradled in her arms, Donna made her way through the darkened bullpen towards her desk. The area was unusually empty for the hour; she assumed the reason was that most staffers had made a break for home shortly after the crash had been lifted. She really couldn’t blame them; she hoped to be doing the same just as soon as she had things organized for Josh’s meeting tomorrow morning. 

She had to admit, if only to herself, that she’d been relieved when Leo had all but ordered Josh to go home about a half hour ago. Despite having been all but out the door immediately before the crash, Josh had protested vehemently, claiming that he had had work to do. But Leo had obviously seen what she had in Josh’s tired eyes and guarded expression, because he’d brooked no argument, tempering his strict directive with a gentle squeeze of the shoulder and sympathetic eyes. 

Lost in thought, she nearly walked headfirst into Josh’s closed office door—a door that had been left open when she’d vacated her desk only a few minutes earlier. With mounting concern, she hefted the files onto her hip and raised her now free hand to knock softly. “Josh?” 

Receiving no answer, she cautiously opened the office door, momentarily relieved to find it unlit and still. Squinting into the gloom, however, her anxiety returned with a vengeance when she finally spied him, sitting with his back to the door, completely hidden behind the chair back save the crown of his head. “Josh,” she prompted again, her voice only slightly louder than a whisper. 

“Did you forget something?” she pressed when he again did not respond. 

Finally, he moved, turning the chair only enough so that he could see her standing in the doorway. Her heart sank as she took in his haggard profile. “Why are you still here?” he asked eventually. “Did Leo tell you to stay, and make sure I didn’t circle around and sneak in the back door?” 

Steeling her resolve, she moved with purpose into the office, dropping the files onto a corner of the desk and reaching out to snap on the lamp. “No, I needed to finish up a few things for your meeting with Phillips tomorrow morning.”

Blinking furiously at the intrusion of light, he replied distractedly, “The budget thing?”

She hummed in the affirmative as she sat gingerly in one of the guest chairs, eyes studying his guarded expression in the feeble lamp light. He began to fidget uncomfortably under her scrutiny, finally launching himself from his own chair. “Would you quit staring at me? I’m fine,” he said sharply as he moved out from behind the desk and began to pace.

“Leo sent you home.”

“You do know that you work for me right? I don’t pay you to enforce other people’s rules.” He quickly softened the jibe with a characteristic smirk. 

“You don’t pay me, the government does,” she tossed back nonchalantly. “Besides, Leo’s rules bear a striking similarity to my own, with which I know you are intimately familiar. So stop complaining and tell me what you’re still doing here.”

He regarded her with surprise, momentarily unnerved by the directness of her question, before gesturing towards an oversized, grey plastic utility box sitting on the floor beside the desk which she had not noticed earlier. Its bulky latches were fastened tight, the lid covered in a peach-fuzz layer of dust, the sides sporting an impressive number of scratches and dings. She couldn’t remember ever having seen it before.

While she labored to understand exactly what it was that was going on, he carefully knelt down beside it, running his hand back and forth across the lid, clearing away some of the dust. “I realized earlier that it really won’t make a difference whether I keep this thing in my trunk or not.”

Everything suddenly snapped into place. “Your Mom’s box,” she breathed, the queasiness in the pit of her stomach graduating to full-blown nausea as she allowed for the possibility that the day’s events had affected him more than either she or Leo had originally anticipated.

“Did I ever tell you that they gave me a card?”

“Huh?” she replied stupidly, her brow wrinkling in confusion.

“The National Security Council gave me this card so that, in the event of say, a nuclear attack, I get to go into the bunker with Leo and the President—to ensure the continuity of the chain of command, or something like that. And it turns out that this privilege isn’t one of those things you’re able to refuse,” he added bitterly. “So,” he shrugged, his hand stilling on the lid as he raised his eyes to meet hers, “it occurred to me tonight that this box is irrelevant, really, because I won’t be out there, somewhere,” he waved vaguely out the window towards the grounds and city beyond, “I’ll be in some undisclosed location, in the most well-stocked, well-protected bunker on the planet.” 

She flinched slightly at the self-recrimination and pain she heard in his voice, and immediately tried to assuage his guilt with an empty platitude. “Josh, he’d need you if, heaven forbid, something did—“

He never allowed her to finish the thought, slamming the heel of his hand against the box angrily as he exploded, “My mother would need me! My friends would need me! But I don’t get that choice, do I?” 

Rising from her chair, she moved to crouch beside him on the floor, placing a gentle hand on his arm. “You wouldn’t be running away. You’d be doing what was required of you, what needed to be done.” 

“I’d be leaving the people I love behind,” he choked out plaintively, raising tear-filled eyes to meet her own. There was something there, just behind the guilt and the anger, that she couldn’t—wouldn’t—put a name to, and it both warmed and broke her heart to see it swimming in his watery eyes. 

“You’d be doing what the people you love would want you to do,” she countered softly, hoping he’d understand what it was she meant, but couldn’t say. “No one would blame you, Josh.”

“I would,” he whispered.

“You already do, it would seem,” she admonished gently, realizing with growing clarity that the day’s events had caused the line between his past, and any perceived future hurts, to become inescapably blurred. Sliding her hand across his shoulder, she began to rub lazy circles in the space between his tensed shoulder blades. “You can’t blame yourself for something that may never happen. Well,” she amended, forcing herself to lighten her tone, “you can, because in your world, everything is always about you.” She found herself relieved to see the tiniest of smiles grace his lips, and felt a responding pull at the corners of her mouth as they continued to regard each other in the dim light.

“I thought maybe I could give it to you. The box…I mean,” he said abruptly, breaking eye contact and effectively moving his body out of her reach as he leaned over the box and began fiddling with its latches.

Tamping down her disappointment at the loss of physical contact, Donna carefully lowered herself to the floor, leaning back against the desk for support as he continued to ramble. “You could keep it in your trunk, just in case, so I’d know that…if something did happen…” Gingerly he lifted the lid and peered inside to assess the contents. “I just wanted to check…I haven’t looked in here for a while…”

Donna remained silent, sensing that her presence, more than any words, were providing him with the support and reassurance he needed. He took several minutes to rummage through the box’s contents, then stilled suddenly as he retrieved a battered navy blue cap from its depths. Bringing it to eye level, he circled it round in his hands, leaving faint dusty fingerprints along its edge as he did so. 

She watched him carefully as he studied the cap logo’s frayed stitching, taking careful note of the muscle twitching just above his jaw line, the dramatic bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed deeply.

“Why Joe Pepitone?”

His head snapped up at the sound of her voice, seemingly loud after the silence of the last few minutes. “What do you mean?”

“Wasn’t he a first baseman for the Yankees?”

“How in the hell do you know that?”

She shrugged and cocked an eyebrow. “I know things.”

“You know who played first base for the New York Yankees in the late sixties, and yet you pick Penn over Cincinnati in last week’s football pool?” he shrieked incredulously.

Donna shrugged casually. “I liked their mascot.”

“The Quakers are a religious group that believes in non-violence and consensus to solve conflict! You honestly thought, based on that, that they could win a football game?”

“Violence isn’t always the answer, Joshua.” 

The smile dropped abruptly from his face. “Yeah. Try telling them that.” 

She didn’t have to ask to whom he was referring.

“So, you haven’t answered my question,” she prodded, leaning over to nudge him playfully with her shoulder.

“What question?”

“The cap?” 

His eyes fell to his lap, where the cap now lay against his thigh, clasped between tense fingers. With his other hand, he began to trace the logo’s careworn ridges of thread. “Pepitone had been Joanie’s favorite player. Dad was a Yankees fan, too. I think he may have thought… or forgotten that I…” he faltered, and then shrugged sadly. “Anyway, he was so excited when he gave it to me, and…he’d been her favorite player.” 

Smiling softly, Donna reached out to take the cap from his worrying fingers. With the flat palm of her hand she dusted his fingerprints off of the cloth, then reached out to settle it carefully on his head. Her smile grew at the goofy picture he presented: almost forty years old, sitting cross-legged on his office floor, with an ill-fitting baseball cap perched bulbously atop his wild hair. “Then maybe you should keep this.”

“Okay,” he whispered softly, as he reached up and laid his hand atop his head, and the cap, with reverence. 

Rising stiffly from her spot on the floor, she reached out a hand to him. “C”mon,” she encouraged with a jerk of her head, “let’s get out of here. You can help me carry the box to my car.”

Reaching up, he allowed her to help him lever his protesting body from the floor, only barely managing to catch the cap as it became dislodged from his head during the process. “I can?”

“Yes, Joshua, you can. It looks heavy.”

“Not that heavy,” he whined, putting a hand to his lower back, stretching and wincing melodramatically for emphasis. 

She dropped her head to one side, folded her arms across her chest, and considered him with exasperation. “And you were doing so well there, what with the chivalrous gift-giving and all.”

“I was?” he asked in bewilderment.

“You were,” she called over her shoulder as she walked to her desk to retrieve her coat and bag.

“So, shouldn’t I be rewarded? You know, for my exceptionally good behavior?” 

Turning to face him fully through the doorway, she threaded one arm through her coat sleeve before propositioning coyly, “If you carry that for me, I’ll bring you coffee tomorrow morning.”

“Done,” he replied enthusiastically, reaching down for the box before realizing that one of his hands was already full. He straightened slowly, licked his lips as he again studied his precious cargo. He ran his fingers over the brim a final time, as a smile played bashfully at the corners of his mouth. Then, after hefting his backpack onto the desktop, he placed the cap carefully inside, zipped up the pouch, and settled the pack on his shoulder. 

“Ready?” she called out from the bullpen a moment later. 

Hefting the box from the floor with a mighty grunt, he shuffled slowly out the office door, his balance precarious as he trailed behind her. “Yeah, but you’d better be getting me a Starbucks Venti dark roast. This thing weighs a ton.”

 

*fin.*


End file.
